English
701 E6W3 -- Registrar’s Code 0622
MA
Graduate Methodology
Professor
David Richter
Spring
2005
Klapper
302 (It’s the Smart Classroom, whatever we are) at 6:30-8:00 pm Wednesdays
Syllabus
Required
Texts: These are books you ought to have
and keep.
James L. Harner, Literary Research
Guide: A Guide to Reference Sources for the Study of Literatures in English and
Related Topics. 4rd edition,
paperback, MLA Press, ISBN# 0873529839
(referred to below as Harner)
Wayne C. Booth, et al., The Craft of
Research. 2nd Edition. University of Chicago Press, 2003. ISBN: 0226065685 Referred to below as Booth. [This is a new text substituting for
others; assignments in Booth TBA.]
Guidelines for the course:
The
center of this course is the weekly assignments; the secret is not to get
behind in them. The success of each
class session depends on your being able to share insights gained from the
previous work's week; in many senses, this course is a collective endeavor and
we will be posting our work for our fellow students to look at using the
webcourse program BLACKBOARD (details forthcoming).. Even if you miss a class, it's your responsibility
to get the next week's assignment and hand it in on time. Please KEEP DUPLICATES OF ALL
ASSIGNMENTS.
This
course is on the CUNY Portal website, and I will be setting up places where
students can post (1) their assignments, for others to read; (2) questions and
problems, for me and other students to help out with; (3) model papers to
imitate, but not slavishly, of course.
Instructions for how to use the CUNY Portal System will be passed out on
the first day, and I’d like you to get set up there ASAP so that it can be used
as it’s supposed to be.
David
Richter contact information:
Office:
Klapper 639
Days
in: Wednesday only
Office
Hours: 4-6 W
Telephone:
718-997-4684 (voicemail is available but I don’t seem to be able to access it
from elsewhere)
Tentative Schedule
February 2: Introduction: joining the critical conversation, finding your own voice
February
9:
Read O'Rourke and Newman for February 9; read Marchitello and Weisberg for
March 1.
(1) Marchitello, Howard. "(Dis)Embodied
Letters and The Merchant of Venice: Writing, Editing, History." ELH,
62:2 (1995 Summer), pp. 237-65.
(2) Newman, Karen. "Portia's Ring:
Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice" Shakespeare
Quarterly, 38:1 (1987 Spring), pp. 19-33.
(3) Weisberg, Richard H. "Antonio's
Legalistic Cruelty: Interdisciplinarity and 'The Merchant of Venice'." College
Literature, 25:1 (1998 Winter), pp. 12-20.
(4) James L. O'Rourke -
Racism and Homophobia in The Merchant of Venice - ELH 70:2
February 16: The Internet and Library Research.
Scholarly Journals: defining a field of knowledge
Harner, Introduction, K.
Journal assignment due
February 23: Yes, sources are books too. Presentation by Richard Wall: Meet in Rosenthal 225.
Harner: A, B, C, D
First article assignment due
March 2: Reading Criticism Critically II: a writer's use of sources
Harner: Q 3710-3850
Handbook 5
Second article assignment due
March 9: Developing a literary question
Harner: E, M 1310-1400
Question assignment due
March 16: Developing a Critical Voice
Handbook 2
Critical voice assignment due
March 23: Compiling a Bibliography
Harner: G (read with special care in preparation)
Handbook 4
Bibliographic essay due
March 30: Monday schedule, no classes.
April 6: Writing a Prospectus
Harner: select the relevant section, from M - T
Working bibiography due
April 13: The Oxford English Dictionary is Your Friend
Harner: M 1410-1420
Draft of Prospectus due
April 20: Seeking Out the Original Sources: The Short Title Catalogue
OED assignment due
April 27: Passover Break, no classes
May 4: Do Storks Bring Texts? What Editors Do
Harner: M 1990-2005
Short Title Catalogue
Assignment Due
May 11: Just the Facts, Ma'am: What Happened?
Editing Assignment due
May 18: Discussion of Prospectus
Factual Evaluation Assignment due
May
25: Final Prospectus Due
Assignment #1
Due: February 18
Journal Assignment
Choose a scholarly journal in the field of
"English" that has been publishing for at least fifty years; you may
select a generalist journal, such as PMLA or Modern Philology, or
a specialized journal in a field of interest to you, for example, American
Literature or Shakespeare Quarterly.
Trace the history of the way the journal defines its field of knowledge
by studying one issue from each decade of the past fifty years plus three
issues of the last ten years. The
preferred way to do this is to take, for example, the Winter issue of the
journal from 2000, 1990, 1980, 1970, 1960 and 1950, plus two other issues from
the period 1990-2000, for example, Winter 1998 and Winter 1993.
Read carefully the Table of Contents and any Abstracts in
each issue; read fully at least one article and skim the others. How does the journal define what it
studies? Has that changed over the past
fifty years? Over the past ten? How?
How has the focus of the articles changed? Is there any kind of article that appears now
and would not have appeared twenty years ago?
Any that appeared earlier that could not appear now?
Write a two- to four-page essay that analyzes the changes
in the journal you have chosen: how has its definition of its field of
knowledge changed historically?
Assignment #2 and #3
Due February 23 and March 1.
This assignment asks you to begin the process of
discovering the major works in your field and to start positioning
your Prospectus historically and theoretically.
It asks you to form a preliminary bibliography with which you'll work as
you begin writing; an exhaustive bibliographic search on your subject will come
later.
Compile a list of at least ten sources that you
will cite in your Prospectus, and include a brief annotation on why you have
chosen the work. (Obviously, your
Prospectus will change as you work on it; you will be free to alter this list
as your project takes shape.) The list
must include two works that are not strictly literary criticism--for
instance, works of history, theory, social science.
Suggestions for determining the major works in your
field.
1) Always begin
with your question; look for significant texts which will help you in
some way to answer this question.
2) Consider
beginning with an important article in the field. Use the MLA Bibliography (either in bound
volumes, on CD-ROM, or through Academic
Search Premiere), an index such as Contemporary Literary Criticism in
the Gale series, or one of the bibliographies in your field described in Harner
to generate a list of recent articles in your area. Select one of these articles, judging by
title, author, journal in which it appeared, and follow its references. The references in this article will lead you
to others, which you can then follow in the same way. (If you don't yet feel you have a sense of
which journals and authors are likely to produce important articles, use the Arts
and Humanities Citation Index to determine which works are cited most
frequently by other critics.)
3) Use the library
catalogue (once cards, now the CUNY+ system), or one of the bibliographic
sources listed above, to locate a recent book in your field. Study its bibliography, notes and index. Which works are central to the author's
argument? Which ones does the author
feel she has to take on before she can make her own point? What histories or theories is she relying
on? Would these be useful for you? (The reason for stressing recent articles and
books, of course, is that they will have the most up-to-date references. An article from 1949, no matter how good it
is, will not have references to works published in the 1990s.)
4) Use your
expertise in reading scholarly journals.
Start with a reliable journal in your field, or perhaps with two
journals that take different approaches; read through a year of issues; see
what theoretical and critical works emerge as significant. Who are the scholars whose names seem always
to be invoked? What work (if any) have
these scholars done in your area? What
works are they citing in their books?
5) Locate yourself
theoretically. Be analytical about the kind
of question you are asking in the prospectus, and then work on building up a
base of theoretical texts that will underlie your claims or with which you will
be in contention. Start with theoretical
works that have been important to you so far, with a good anthology of literary
theory such as mine, a good introduction to the subject such as Terry
Eagleton's, a good specialized collection of articles such as Henry Louis
Gates's "Race," Writing, and Difference, or with one of the
reference works on theory listed in Harner.
Make use of the bibliographies in these works to locate texts that will
be important in answering your question.
Part I
A progress report on your efforts to define a preliminary
bibliography. List every method you used
to identify major works; list in correct MLA form every source you consulted,
article you read, leads you pursued even if they turned out not to be
helpful. At the end of the narrative of
your search, you should have at least four works for your bibliography.
Part II
The preliminary bibliography in finished form, again with
an account, as above, of methods you used to locate sources. Remember that each entry should be
accompanied by a brief annotation and that the bibliography must include two works
that are not primarily literary criticism.
Assignment #4 – Due March 8
“An Overwhelming Question”
With this assignment, you begin to narrow the focus of
your work in the course towards your own topic.
The goal of the assignment is to develop the question at the center of
your prospectus. Thus the assignment is to submit:
1) your
question or questions;
2) a
paragraph on how you arrived at the question;
3) a
paragraph on where you think the question will lead.
Some methods of developing a literary question:
1) "Look into
thy heart and write" (or so said Sir Philip Sidney in Astrophel and
Stella). This is one time-honored
method. This involves examining one's
own experiences and the ways those experiences have been shaped by literary and
social texts. But one method is to ask
the question that moves you most, that is most important to you, no matter how
large it seems. Then, if can be answered
through a study of literary texts, think about how you can narrow it to make it
manageable in a thesis.
2) Make connections and explore them. It is almost always useful to look at
literary texts in terms of the historical moment at which they were written and
the present historical moment that reads them; to think about how a text works
within or against certain literary conventions; to interrogate the critical
reception of a text; to explore the connection between the text and others in
its literary tradition or in other traditions in which it might be read.
3) Define a field
and read around in it to discover your question. If you know you want to write on contemporary
African American fiction, steep yourself in it, read as much as you can until
certain issues seem to suggest themselves to you. Then (or even first) get a sense of what other
readers are currently asking about the field: read a couple of issues of
different related journals; try the on-line bibliography and then browsing in
the stacks just to see what other people are writing about; ask a specialist in
the field how viable your question seems.
(Visit or phone QC professors during their office hours.)
4) Don't worry about the field--start instead with current
critical questions. Choose a journal,
especially a general one that tries to cover the field of "English"
as a whole--PMLA, diacritics, Critical Inquiry, Representations,
for example--and study the kind of questions currently animating English
studies. Or try journals with clear
critical or ideological positions if you already know what line of inquiry you
want to use. For instance, if you want
to write a feminist thesis, read Signs, Women's Studies Quarterly,
Feminist Studies and differences; if you are thinking about
cultural criticism, try Cultural Critique, Public Culture and Social
Text. (The reference librarian will
be able to help you in selecting journals.)
Are any of the current questions interesting to you? Are there ways you could apply such questions
to other texts? How could you go
further, either building on or arguing with current scholarship and criticism?
The question you turn in does not have to be the final
version of the question for your Prospectus.
Part of the work of the course is to learn how to develop and recognize
fruitful literary questions, and how to revise and reshape something that can’t
work into something that can.
Critical Voice Assignment
Assignment #5:
Due March 15
This assignment constitutes the beginning of your work on
creating a bibliography in your field. It is also designed to help you in forming
your own way of entering the critical conversation on your question.
Choose two recent articles or chapters of books (by
"recent" I mean since 1990) that are relevant to your question. Be
inventive: look in the CUNY+ system for titles, comb the relevant periodicals,
think about historical or sociological articles that might be important to you.
For instance, if you were working on a question about Shakespeare and magic,
why not look for the most up-to-date research on Renaissance witchcraft and magic
and its significance within that society? Then you might combine this with a
more straightforwardly literary article on Shakespeare, or on poetical
representations of the supernatural in early modern writers. Or perhaps there
is a new critical or biographical book on Shakespeare that looks significant
(judge significance by the title, the sound of the Preface or Introduction, the
range of references quoted in the notes, even the quality of the press that
published it.)
Once you have chosen the two articles, complete the
following assignments:
1) Repeat the process we have developed for identifying
major critical works in your field. After reading the two articles or chapters,
do any critical, theoretical or editorial works emerge as major in the field?
If so, what are they? List in correct bibliographic form. (You'll be returning
to these works later, when you compile the bibliography.)
2) Pinpoint in each article the moment (there may be more
than one) when you feel the author is asserting her or his own critical voice.
Where does the writer's own argument emerge? Where do you hear the distinctive
voice of the writer? Select one passage from your two articles that you think
illustrates most clearly the assertion of an original critical argument and
bring at least ten xeroxed copies of this page to class. REMEMBER TO WRITE ON
THE COPIES THE FULL BIBLIOGRAPHIC INFORMATION ON THE ARTICLE. Be prepared to
discuss in class why you chose the passage.
[Note: This is a pre-Blackboard form of the assignment.
I'm going to try to figure out how and where we can POST our pages and
paragraphs to the website to save all this xeroxing.]
Preliminary Bibliographical Essay
Assignment #6:
Due March 22
Draft of Bibliographical Essay
of the Prospectus
A prospectus is in three parts:
a statement of the question and the methodology you are going to use to answer
it, a presentation of the current state of that question, and an annotated
working bibliography. This assignment is designed to produce a draft of section
#2. In the finished prospectus it will come just before the annotated
bibliography, introducing the bibliography and making a connection to your
opening discussion of question and methodology.
In one or two pages (three would
really be a maximum), provide for your readers A SENSE OF THE CURRENT STATE OF
Outline the major developments
or currents of thought in your field: what are the central issues in your field
today? Are those issues relatively new, related to the advent of
"theory" in our discipline, a renewed interest in history, the new
insurgencies of feminism, gay and lesbian studies, multiculturalism?
Who are the major figures
writing on your topic and why are their contributions important? You won't have
room to summarize everything they've said, but a sentence or phrase about each
can tell us what positions they take.
Finally, you'll want to survey
the work on exactly your topic. For instance, if there is already one book and
six articles written on the relation of the plague to the portrayal of death in
English tragedy, you should give a full account of each of these works and
explain what will be original about your thesis. "Although the works of X,
Y and Z have already shown a relation between the plague and Jacobean drama, I
plan to complicate their arguments by suggesting that the plague is central to
the drama of the period, even though it usually appears in disguised
form"--that would be one example of how you might explain your
originality. Or, on another topic, "A, B and C have shown that Bakhtin's
concept of `dialogics' is enormously fruitful for reading Joyce; D and E have
done pioneering work on feminism and Joyce's use of language; my aim is to
bring these two topics together in a Bakhtinian analysis of women's discourse
in Dubliners."
When you are finished, readers both
inside and outside the field should be able to pick up your bibliographic essay
and come away with a clear sense of the issues in the field and of the specific
work on your question. You need to demonstrate both that you know the field in
general (including relevant literary theory) and that you are in command of the
criticism directly addressing your question.
Draft of Annotated Working Bibliography
Assignment #7:
Due March 29
Draft of Annotated Working
Bibliography of the Prospectus
To repeat: A prospectus is in
three parts: a statement of the question and the methodology you are going to
use to answer it, a presentation of the current state of that question, and an
annotated working bibliography.
This assignment is designed
to produce a draft of section #3. Here you will present what you have found so
far: some of the sources that will be used in the thesis. The entries will be
in alphabetical order, and the bibliographical form will be, needless to say,
impeccable.
The annotations should be as
concise and pointed as possible. Ideally they will be neither purely objective
(a mere statement of what the source is about) nor purely subjective (a
statement of what value the sources is likely to be for your thesis) but a
combination of the two.
For example, if you were
writing about the Concubine of Gibeah in Judges 19 (as I have done, you can
read it on my web page if you want), an anthropological article on bina
(matrilocal) marriage in the ancient near east might be annotated as follows:
Grossman suggests on the
basis of both Biblical texts and archeological research that two forms of
marriage coexisted uneasily in the ancient near east: "normal"
patrilocal marriage, where wives joined the husband's family, and bina
marriage, where husbands worked for their fathers-in-law. If true, then the
word for "concubine" in some biblical texts, including mine, may
actually mean "bina wife," which might help explain the bizarre
behavior of the Levite and his father-in-law.
Obviously not every annotation
would have to be as complicated as that one to make its relevance to your
project clear. If you are writing on Fielding, you might annotate the Martin
and Ruthe Battestin biography as follows:
Massive, up-to-date biography
of Henry Fielding, entirely indispensable on Fielding's life and times.
BTW: You annotate ONLY what
you were able to look at, not what you couldn't find. So not all works are
going to be annotated at this stage.
First Draft of Prospectus
Assignment #8:
First Draft of Full Prospectus
Due April 19
This is your first attempt,
but not your last, to pull the prospectus together, and it means revising and
updating all three parts up to the point you have reached. Revising means that
everything should hang together: if you have shifted your question a bit, that
may change the focus of the bibliographical essay and may alter what texts will
go into the working bibliography. Ideally, changes in what you are doing should
be kept to a minimum after this stage: it should be improved, and extended if
you were unable to look at important sources, but not radically altered unless
you (or I) discover some flaw in your plan. A final draft will come in at the
very end of term, that is, by May 24, although you can turn in your final draft
any time it is ready and I encourage you to do that.
(In the meanwhile we will be engaging in a variety of
other scholarly activities.)
Assignment No. 9
Due April 26
Select one of the underlined
words from the following obscure literary text:
HAMLET: To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind
to suffer
The slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea
of troubles,
And by opposing, end them. To die,
to sleep
-- [60]
No more, and by a sleep to say
we end
The heart-ache and the thousand
natural shocks
That flesh is heir to; 'tis a
consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die,
to sleep --
To sleep, perchance to dream --
ay, there's the rub, [65]
For in that sleep of death what
dreams may come,
When we have shuffled
off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause; there's the
respect
That makes calamity of so long
life:
For who would bear the whips
and scorns of
time, [70]
Th' oppressor's wrong, the
proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the
law's delay,
The insolence of office,
and the spurns
That patient merit of th'
unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus
make [75]
With a bare bodkin; who
would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a
weary life,
But that the dread of something
after death,
The undiscovered country from
whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles
the will, [80]
And makes us rather bear those
ills we have
Than fly to others that we know
not of?
Thus conscience does make
cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of
resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast
of
thought, [85]
And enterprises of great pitch
and moment
With this regard their currents
turn awry
And lose the name of action. --
Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia. Nymph, in thy
orisons
Be all my sins
remembered.
1) Using your selected word,
determine its history, its different historical forms, the development of its
meanings. Can you explain the transition from one meaning to another? Start
with the
2) Using a concordance to the
works of either Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser or Milton, select at least one
further passage in which your word appears. Find the passage in the original
and exactly how you feel that word should be read. Feel free to look up the
word in several of these authors, or to comment on the use of the word in
several different instances.
Short Title Catalogue Assignment
Assignment No. 10
The Short-Title Catalogue
Due May 3rd
The purpose of this assignment
is to find materials available in archival microfilm at the Rosenthal Library.
The process has a number of steps but should not take very long.
(1) Look up any one of the
books from the STC on my suggestion list, OR any of the other books in the STC
that you have interest in. Take note of the STC number.
(2) Look up the STC number in
the Crossindex file located near the STC in the reference section of Rosenthal,
and read across to the microfilm reel number.
(3) Down on the first floor of
Rosenthal, in the Microform Area, find the appropriate reel (they are in
drawers to the left of the librarian's desk), find the right document on your
reel, and browse through it. When you're done, xerox the title page and any
other page that you find of interest.
(For example, the Francis Meres
Palladis Tamia volume contains several contemporary references to
Shakespeare as a playwright.)
Then briefly write up any
problems you had with the process.
If you are more interested in
early American literature than English literature, you may want to adapt this
assignment to use the Early American microform series against the back wall of
the Microform Area.
In terms of the mechanics,
you're on your own---I don't know exactly what we have and how you go about
finding out what microfilm reel contains the book you're interested in.
Note that the people who work
down there are often NOT professional librarians, just aides who may not know
much about the collection.
Again, briefly write up your
adventure.
Editing Assignment
Assignment #11
Due May 10
Look, Mom, I Can Edit Shakespeare
Choose ONE of the following
editorial cruces [the key word is in brackets] and write a brief (1-2 page)
account of how you would handle the problem if you were editing the play. In
each case, I give The
Become an expert on your line.
Start with the New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, edited by Horace Howard
Furness; then consult other editions such as the
Explain 1) the nature of the crux;
2) which reading you would select; and 3) the basis for your decision. Do not
consider the line in isolation either from the rest of the play or from a
theory of editing. What approach to editing have you taken? How does that
approach motivate your choice for this line?
Crux #1: Henry V. II.iii.16-17.
". . . for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and 'a [babbl'd] of green
fields . . ."
Crux #2: Hamlet. I.i.66.
. . . He smote the sledded [Polacks] on the ice.
Crux #3: Hamlet. I.iv.36-38
. . . the dram of [ev'l]
Doth all the noble substance of a doubt
To his own scandal.
Crux #4: King Lear. IV.iii.
[the entire scene is a crux]
Crux #5: Romeo and Juliet.
I.iv.58-62
...Over men's noses as they lie asleep.
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old Grub,
Time out of mind the fairies' coachmakers.
Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners' legs....
Facts, Pseudo-Facts, and Damned Lies Assignment
Assignment #12
"Just the Facts, Ma'am": Evaluating Source
Materials
Due May 17
Penultimate assignment! Facts are stubborn things, but
sometimes they aren't clear, or obvious, or uncontested. You will often find
that two different sources of "objective" scholarly information will
come up with two different stories. Sometimes this is the result of pure
inadvertent error -- a mistyped date, an understandable confusion about the
order of two events. Other times it can be the result of different weights
being given to two sources of information: Biographer A trusts Source X, while
Biographer B trusts Source Y. Sometimes new sources of information are found
that make the earlier factual narrative obsolete. And at times biographers
suppress information they have about their subject for ideological reasons.
(For examples, encyclopedias from before around 1960 seldom mentioned why Oscar
Wilde was imprisoned.)
Your assignment is to FIND a factual disparity between
two biographies of the same author and -- if possible --to explain and/or resolve
it. The biographies can be as large as multivolume scholarly monographs, or as
small as encyclopedia articles or the little biographical introductions you
find in paperback editions of standard authors, and it may be more convenient
for you to use the latter. You may think this is going to be like looking for a
needle in a haystack, but it's actually hard to find two brief biographies of
an author that agree in all details. Taking down two editions of James Hogg's
novel, The Private Confessions and Memoirs of a Justified Sinner from my
office, just now, I find that the introduction to the first says he was born in
November of 1770, the other that he was born in December of that year, the
first says he published a book in 1807 called The Shepherd's Guide and
the other says he published one called On the Diseases of Sheep.
Once you have found a genuine disparity (not just a piece
of information that one has and the other one doesn't) do whatever you can to
check out which (if either) source is correct. In my example, I might look to
see if there were a recent biography of Hogg that could enlighten me about the
actual date of his birth, or explain if the November/December discrepancy might
have had to do with the calendar shift from Julian to Gregorian in Scotland in
the mid-eighteenth century. Or I might consult the Library of Congress or
British Library catalogues to discover what Hogg's book was actually called,
whether it might have been a book on the diseases of sheep rather than a book
entitled On the Diseases of Sheep.
Try to do an author you're already working on, or at
least remotely interested in, but for those who need assistance finding a juicy
topic, you can have fun trying to figure out how, when and where Edgar Allan
Poe died, or how and why Christopher Marlowe was killed, or where and when
Aphra Behn was born.
Write up your experience concisely (1-2 pages could do
it, but you could go double that if you had an interesting time).
Final Draft of the Prospectus
Just the revised, improved version of the draft I have already seen.
Due: May 24th
although I will accept it any time before then.
As far as AFTER then, I will
check with the registrar about when the grades need to come in and then figure
out how late these can come in without getting INC grades.